WASHINGTON—The widening NSA whistleblower scandal moved in multiple directions Monday, spreading to Britain even as it atomized into a war of words between President Barack Obama and the former intelligence insider responsible for the leaks.

Separately, Obama and Snowden engaged in interviews that amounted to duelling rhetoric, with the president offering fresh assurances of the limits of National Security Agency surveillance and Snowden arguing precisely the opposite from an undisclosed location in Hong Kong.

Obama bristled at comparisons to former vice-president Dick Cheney, the most hawkish of the Bush-era politicos, telling PBS interviewer Charlie Rose he has sought to ensure a robust system of “checks and balances” to prevent intelligence overreach since taking office.

“Some people say, ‘Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney,’ ” Obama said in an exchange recorded Sunday, prior to his departure for the G8 summit. “My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather, are we setting up a system of checks and balances?”

Cheney also figured prominently in the latest interview with Snowden — but as a point of pride. He proclaimed, “Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honour you can give an American.”

Snowden’s comments came during a nearly two-hour-long live Q&A with The Guardian, the British newspaper he chose as his outlet to the world. He used the forum to clarify and expand on his accusations of weak barriers that enable U.S. analysts to breach privacy worldwide.

Snowden flatly denied allegations he is sharing U.S. secrets with China, saying he has had “no contact” with the Chinese government since choosing Hong Kong as a base to ride out the storm.

“Ask yourself: If I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now,” he wrote.

Snowden also renewed his earlier claim that U.S. intelligence analysts with high-level security clearance are able to wiretap anyone, up to and including Obama, saying that neither policy nor technical protections prevent such surveillance.

And even those weak protections, he said, evaporate once communications extend beyond the U.S. border.

Officials have said the interventions don’t target Americans or people inside the U.S.

“Suspicionless surveillance does not become OK simply because it’s only victimizing 95 per cent of the world instead of 100 per cent,” Snowden wrote.

Asked why he waited until now to make the disclosures public, Snowden said he wanted to give Obama a chance to rein in security overreach in the wake of 9/11.

“Unfortunately, (Obama) deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.”

Obama, in defending NSA surveillance, insisted to PBS that the surveillance programs are “transparent” thanks to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates secretly. But later in the interview, he acknowledged he is pushing for elements of the program to be declassified to assuage public doubts.

“Even though we have all these systems of checks and balances — Congress is overseeing it, federal courts are overseeing it — despite all that, the public may not fully know,” Obama said. “And that can make the public kind of nervous, right?”

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